


third time's the charm

by krakens



Category: BrainDead (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-29 17:46:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7693675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krakens/pseuds/krakens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laurel keeps making things weird, and Gareth keeps rolling with the punches.</p>
            </blockquote>





	third time's the charm

**Author's Note:**

> Trying to predict what’s going to happen on this show is honestly impossible, but my friends + I all agree that Gareth and Laurel should make out in a supply closet at some point, so here’s this.

Laurel explains everything over several rounds of drinks. And then she explains everything again a little more frankly as they walk a haphazard lap around the Mall, where they’re less likely to be overheard. The third iteration of the story takes them to the block her apartment’s on, and by the time she’s wrapping up she’s clearly getting agitated with him.

“Please don’t make me say all that again,” she adds in the same breath as the tail end of her explanation.

“I wasn’t going to,” he assures her, looking up at the light-polluted and dull night sky. For the most part, her story’s hung together every time she’s told it. She sometime recalls a fact she missed off-hand (it took her until the third telling to remember that her brother’s Chief of Staff has also apparently been infected), but he didn’t hear any glaring logical inconsistencies.

Laurel’s silent for all of ten steps. “You’re freaking me out,” she says.

“ _I’m_ freaking _you_ out?” he asks, more amused than affronted.

“I don’t know,” she says, and her pace slackens as they approach her building. “I’m telling you about brain-eating bugs and you’re standing there asking me questions like I’m talking about the Pythagorean theorem. You’re not even really making faces.”

“I’ll try to do more with my face,” he promises.

“Well?” she asks. He glances over at her. She has her hands jammed into the pockets of her mildly ridiculous key-lime colored coat and she’s staring at the pavement as she marches forward. “Do you… believe me?”

“I mean,” he starts. “I want to see those pictures and the lab results.”

“But?” she asks.

“Are you lying to me?” he asks. She shakes her head no. “And are you pretty sure this is actually happening?”

“Yes,” she says resolutely.

“Then yes,” he says. She stops dead in place on the sidewalk and he pauses a few feet ahead of her.

“Can you just,” she says, running both her hands through her hair. “Can you just, I don’t know, act surprised?”

“This is _shocking_ ,” he bites out in the most scandalized tone he can manage.

She cracks a smile at that, which makes him chuckle, and the tense line of her shoulders drops to a slightly less defensive position for the first time this evening. She joins him and they resume walking at a more leisurely pace.

“You’re being way too level-headed about this,” she reiterates.

“I’m not really sure what the proper reaction is to being told that my boss is being controlled by bugs from _outer space_ ,” he says, with extra emphasis on those words, the first real indication he’s made that the situation is even slightly out of the ordinary. She snaps back to defense mode quickly enough.

“It sounds like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I know—”

“It doesn’t sound like that,” he says. She glances over at him from under her dark eyelashes. “The aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers made copies of people, they didn’t infect them. And they were plants, not ants.”

Her face screws up in disbelief. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No,” he says, and then off her glare corrects himself: “A little. But you should know this. You studied film.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’ll have to brush up on classic science fiction,” she says.

“That’s obviously your step one,” he says as they come to her door.

“So, uhm,” she says fidgeting with her keys. “Would it be weird if I invited you up? Not for – just because – you know, we’re standing here and it’s late and you probably have questions still—”

“Do you have coffee?” he interrupts, as intrigued as he is to see what kind of a hole she might dig herself into if he let her keep rambling.

“Yeah,” she says.

“I’d take coffee,” he says.

“Great,” she says, pushing the front door open.

They ascend the stairs in silence, and she opens her door in silence, and as he settles in at her kitchen table in silence the full awkwardness of the situation begins to wash over him. As she fills the coffee maker, he grapples for something to say that might fill the void, but the only thing he can call to mind is the fact that he'd lost a button off his shirt when she’d ripped it off of him, and he quickly concludes that that definitely isn’t worth bringing up.

Instead he turns his attention back to her: she’s moving robotically as she goes through the motions of making coffee, so hyper-focused that there’s a crease in her brow. Laurel’s way too self-aware to be delusion, a little too much so for her own good. Throughout the evening she’s been cagey and persistently frustrated with herself, biting out the less believable parts of her story through grit teeth and making cracks at her own expense.

“So…” he says, deciding that the best way to move things forward is just to keep asking her questions. She seems happy to answer them, maybe because it makes the conversation a little more reciprocal. “How many people are infected, about?”

She shrugs as she hits the button on the coffee maker. “Uhmm,” she hums, turning around and leaning against the counter. “Maybe twenty that we know of for sure. At least twice that if I’m just guessing.”

“How many senators?” he asks.

“Well, Red and Ella,” she says, crossing the kitchen to her liquor cabinet and fishing around in it for a second before producing a bottle of Irish Cream. “And the female democratic senators always back Ella up no matter what she tells them to do, but I don’t know if that’s because of the bugs or not,” she continues as she sets it on the counter.

“And there’s nothing we can do to help them?” Gareth asks.

“We’re working on it,” Laurel says. “Rochelle and Gustav are, anyway. I’m just…” She sighs and crosses her arms over her chest. “I have to believe there’s some way to fix it,” she says after a second. “You know, for there to not be a cure…”

“Even if the other senators aren’t infected, losing two prominent figures at a time like this would be… chaotic,” he agrees. “And that’s not even – your friends,” he says, struggling to put the sentiment to tasteful words. He knows her friend’s death has been hard on her, and if that was genuinely tied up in all this, he can imagine how visceral the consequences must seem.

“Your _boss_ ,” she continues, effectively silencing him. “I guess you probably know Red pretty well,” she adds, almost an afterthought.

“Yeah,” he confirms. The coffee maker buzzes and she pulls a pair of mugs off the shelf. “I’ve been working for him… almost seven years, now.”

“I didn’t know that,” Laurel says apologetically. She glances over her shoulder and holds up the bottle of Baileys, a silent question. He just nods; the buzz from the drinks they had at the bar gave up on him sometime around the Lincoln Memorial, and if they’re going to keep talking about this he could use a little nerve.

“I noticed the change in his behavior, obviously,” he says. “But I just thought he had a midlife crisis or a come to Jesus or something. It never even occurred to me that there might be something _wrong_ with him. You’re supposed to congratulate people when they stop drinking, right?” he asks as she hands him his mug. “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” she says, and they drink.

“Red had… a lot of problems,” Gareth says, trying not to feel too much like he’s eulogizing him. Laurel pulls a chair out and sits down kitty-corner to him, close enough that their knees brush under the table. “Especially personal ones. He drank too much. He slept with women he _really_ shouldn’t have. And he never got anything done. My friends were always telling me it was a dead-end job. But there were things we agreed on, politically. I think a lot of the time he wanted to do the right thing, but he was just too scared to actually do it.”

“Like with the shutdown deal,” Laurel says over the brim of her mug.

“Yeah,” he says. “Like that.”

“We’ll figure something out,” she says quietly, and he’s not sure if she’s trying to reassure him or herself.

And then, because she’s said enough weird things tonight that he thinks he probably gets at least one free pass, he bites the bullet on bringing up something that’s been bothering him all night. “Can I ask you something that’s probably going to seem really unimportant and stupid?”

Her eyebrows lift into an expression of delicate skepticism. “Alright,” she agrees before taking a particularly long swig of her coffee.

“The bug thing…” he begins, getting tripped up a little as he struggles with his phrasing. “Is that the only reason you broke up with Onofrio?”

“Oh my _God,_ ” she laughs, sounding awfully judgmental for someone who’s spent the whole evening clawing back like an angry cat every time he’s chuckled at something she said.

“I warned you,” he says, holding his hands up in defeat.

“You did,” she says, and her nose crinkles as she seems to consider his question in earnest. “And no, it wasn’t the only reason.”

“I don’t want to pry,” he says.

“Yes you do,” she counters whip-quick, although she seems to be enjoying the banter, for what that’s worth. “But that’s fine. Anyway. He had a serious girlfriend when we went out, which he failed to mention to me. So that was the main thing.”

“Oh,” he says into his coffee.

“Don’t look so _glum_ ,” she teases. “That’s what you wanted to hear, right?”

“Not exactly,” he says, even though he’s not even really sure what he was _hoping_ the answer was going to be.

“I still think you’re wrong about the Senate torture report, by the way,” she says, twisting her hand into her hair.

“You’re stubborn, so that doesn’t surprise me,” he says.

“It’s just – it can all be unrelated, you know? He got the bugs, and it didn’t work out with us, and I think you’re wrong,” she says, counting the three things off on her fingers.

“Right,” he agrees tersely, noting that her tone has taken on a sudden sharp quality. “I wasn’t trying to say you _should_ blame him. I guess I was just wondering—”

“I know what you were wondering,” she interrupts.

“When did we start arguing?” he wonders aloud.

“We’re not arguing,” she snaps back.

“It kind of feels like—” he begins, but she cuts him off again.

“I just like you, alright? Fourth unrelated point of fact.”

Her words take a second to land, but once they do he has to bite down his smile. “You don’t have to sound so pissed off about it,” he says, and the tension between them snaps like a piano string. She leans back in her chair, one corner of her mouth tugging up into a half-smile.

“I don’t really know what’s going on here,” she admits.

“Me either,” he says. “But I like you, too.”

“I know you do,” she says, and he feels very strongly that he’s being teased again.

Still, the next moment that passes between them is somehow charged; their knees are still touching under the table and her gaze has conspicuously dropped to his mouth. And as much as he’d _like_ to stay, the last few days have proven that making snap decisions is not his forte, and not particularly hers either.

“I should probably go,” he says at length. “It’s late.”

“Yeah,” she agrees breathily, standing up to see him to the door even though it’s only a few feet away. He stands up a little slower. As he’s pulling his jacket on, she lets out an irritated hiss of a sigh, although it seems more self-directed than anything else.

“What?” he asks, pausing at the door.

“I was just going to thank you,” she says. “For… you know, asking me out tonight. But I made it weird.” She rolls her eyes towards the ceiling and he doesn’t think he’s imagining the faint blush that rises to her cheeks. “ _Again_.”

“Ah, it’s alright,” he says. “Raincheck?”

“This was the raincheck,” she points out.

“No,” he says, drawing the word out. “This was a first date.”

Her hand goes up to the nape of her neck as she ducks her head, a sure tell she’s embarrassed.

“Hey, this weekend?” he says, and she glances up at him. “We can get dinner and go to a movie that has… _no_ aliens in it, and then we’ll talk about that.”

She opens her mouth, maybe to agree, but hesitates. “And if something weird happens?”

“Then something weird happens,” he says, shrugging.

“Okay,” she says, finally, and he pushes the door open.

“Good night, Laurel,” he says.

“Good night,” she says, and as he heads out she hangs in the doorway. Halfway down the stairs he cranes his neck to catch one last glimpse and sees her still there, lips pursed into a cautiously pleased smile.

* * *

Pretty much everyone from both Maryland senate offices is in this boardroom, and Laurel won’t stop staring at him.

The meeting’s been dragging on for an hour and a half now, and it’s an exercise in futility just like anything else that involves putting Red and Luke in the same room. But even if the senators themselves are too much at each other’s throats to be aware what’s going on around them, Gareth’s pretty sure _someone_ has noticed Laurel’s indiscreet leering.

He focuses on his notes as best he can, crossing out a potential compromise that’s just been taken off the table. But as Red launches into another idea that Luke will certainly reject for the ridiculous thing it is, Gareth glances up at her again.

She also has a legal pad in front of her, but even though she’s been tapping her pen against the page, he’s pretty sure it’s blank. She’s still staring at him, and in an interesting development is now also absent-mindedly biting her pen.

He looks back down at his notes. It’s all a mess of cross-outs and amendments, and even though he just wrote them he can hardly make sense of them.

Laurel’s all the way across the boardroom table from him, but that doesn’t stop the persistent feeling of her gaze burning into him. He gives in and looks up again; she smirks as they make eye contact and clicks her pen cap as she pretends to turn her attention back to Luke.

“Okay,” Luke says dismissively once Red’s done with his proposal. “I’m just going to cut this off here. Let’s break for lunch. And if you all can come up with something workable we can–maybe–pick this up again tomorrow.”

Everyone stands up and mills out of the room at the pace of people who don’t really want to get back to work. Even though Luke’s staff was sitting at the front of the room and should’ve been the first to exit, Laurel manages to take a full minute to pack her nonexistent notes and very abused pen into her bag and only moves to leave the room as Gareth’s brushing past her.

Since everyone went different ways to take their lunch breaks, they have a little more room to breathe in the hallway.

“Hey,” she says, sidling up to him as they walk.

“Hey,” he says, trying to quickly discern what the tone of this conversation is going to be.

“You busy?” she asks, and she’s absolutely up to something.

He pretends to check his watch. “I’m… on my lunch break,” he says.

“Perfect,” she says, slipping her hand into his and tugging him abruptly sideways. She catches him off-guard so he hardly has time to protest before they end up in a poorly lit (but thankfully vacant) janitor’s office.

Once the door’s closed, she walks them into a wall, backwards and expertly. He has just enough time to wonder if she cased this specific closet out for this specific purpose before she kisses him. His hands find her waist reflexively when she tugs him closer to her by his tie.

He knows he should be the reasonable one here. This is a bad idea for all kinds of reasons; they still haven’t even really gone on a date, they’re at work, they’re in a _closet_. But she slips her hand into his jacket and runs her fingers down his chest, and even that infinitesimal contact sends a shiver down his spine.

“Laurel,” he manages as she break away and kisses his jaw, and then his neck. “Laurel, come on,” he tries again, hoping he sounds more authoritative than desperate this time.

“Sorry,” she says, but she says it against his throat, and instead of taking the opportunity to step away from her like he should, his hips press against hers a little harder.

He kisses her again, and manages to do so with less fervor this time. Her thumb brushes his cheek and when he pulls away she reaches after him for a second before letting her hand drop.

“We should get back to work,” she says, like it’s his fault they’re here.

“You’re a very distracting person,” he tells her, but he still steps back from the wall so she can extricate herself. “You should see my notes from that meeting.”

“Your short attention span is not my problem,” she says, tugging her skirt. She moves to leave first, but as she reaches the door she turns around to address him one last time. “Remember,” she says, wagging a finger at him. “Act _normal_.”

He lets out a heavy sigh as he leans against the wall, tipping his head back to take a second to compose himself. That might be critical advice when you’re wrapped up in a conspiracy and your boss might be the kingpin of an alien invasion, but it’s just a little hypocritical coming from her.

* * *

“Have you noticed that all the big blockbuster films nowadays are awful?” Laurel asks as they check their coats at the restaurant.

She was suitably unimpressed with the tent-pole movie they just saw, as she’s been telling him for the last twenty minutes, so it’s not out of left field. But even though he agrees with her general impression, that seems a little radical. “What, all of them?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says, a seeming dare to be challenged.

“Have you _seen_ all of them?” he asks. She rolls her eyes. “I don’t think you can fairly say every big budget movie in recent memory is awful unless you’ve personally suffered through them.”

“Sometimes you don’t need to see the whole movie,” she says as they wander over the bar as they wait for their table. “Sometimes all you need is to watch the trailer.”

“You can be a little closed-minded sometimes,” he teases.

“I don’t know _what_ you mean,” she says, leaning up on the bar and glancing over at him as he does the same.

“Here’s a serious question,” he says.

“Can’t wait to hear it.”

“So, you don’t like blockbusters. And you don’t like Oscar bait films. And you don’t like art films,” he says, recounting these other dislikes of hers from their pre-movie conversation.

“I missed the question,” she deadpans.

“Do you have a lot of friends in Los Angeles?” he asks, and she pinches his arm in retaliation.

But the amusement falls off her face abruptly and a muttered obscenity falls from her lips when she sees something over his shoulder.

“What?” he asks. She nods in the direction she’s looking and he glances that way. And there, standing by the coat check, is Dean Healy. “Your dad’s here,” he comments dumbly.

“My dad’s here,” she agrees, tugging on her earring as she takes a deep shuddering breath. “And he has a date,” she adds with a tight smile.

This is around the time that Mr. Healy notices them standing by the bar. He leaves the woman in question to check their coats and crosses the room to them.

“Laurel,” he says.

“Hi, Dad,” she says. “Have you met Gareth?”

“Not officially, no,” Mr. Healy says. Gareth’s not really sure what that’s supposed to mean, because they’ve never met before in _any_ capacity, and it seems like a weird distinction to make. It sounds almost like a bid at intimidating, especially combined with the dominating handshake that follows.

“It’s good to meet you, sir,” he gets out before the handshake breaks.

“You too,” Mr. Healy says before returning his attentions to his daughter. “What are you doing here?” he asks. Gareth feels like he’s somehow managed to cut him out of the conversation entirely.

“I came here with Gareth,” Laurel says, putting her hand on his chest as if to demonstrate that he is in fact still there.

“Just getting dinner?” Mr. Healy asks.

“We also saw a movie,” Laurel says.

“Ahh,” Mr. Healy says. The entire exchange is like a passive-aggressive game of verbal chess, and even though Laurel’s managed to put her father in check, the game isn’t over. “Well, I suppose I should introduce _my_ date—”

But this is where things start going really wrong. Mr. Healy’s date has just arrived at the bar, and before he can introduce her, _she_ says: “Oh my God, Laurel?”

Laurel has recognized her, too. “Amanda,” she says, to her credit only sounding a little flabbergasted.

“You two know each other,” Mr. Healy says.

“Yeah,” Laurel says. “We had a poli sci seminar together freshman year.”

“It’s been forever,” Amanda says effusively. “It’s so weird running into you here.”

“You’re telling me,” Laurel says. Even though her tone is affable, her hand is still on his chest and her fingers are curled tightly around his jacket lapels.

And then just when Gareth’s positive the situation couldn’t get weirder, or more awkward, it does. “How do you…” Amanda begins, gesturing between Mr. Healy and the two of them, and Gareth realizes very suddenly that she doesn’t _know_.

Luckily for them, Mr. Healy doesn’t seem as mortified by the situation as he probably should be. “Laurel’s my daughter,” he says. Amanda’s lips fall into a silent _oh_ as she processes the information.

“Your _daughter_ ,” she says.

An awkward beat elapses.

“I’m Gareth,” he says, just to break the silence, and offers her his hand.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Amanda says as they shake.

“Gareth,” Mr. Healy begins in a dangerously meddlesome tone of voice, and Gareth actually feels Laurel bristle up next to him. “Is Senator Wheatus’s Chief of Staff.”

“Oh,” Amanda says, and from her tone of voice he assumes that his job description has doubled down the awkwardness of the situation for her. “I, uhm, I work for Congresswoman Schumacher,” she says, almost sounding apologetic, even though her boss is the one that his boss has been haranguing for the past month.

“Oh,” is all Gareth can think of to say.

Thankfully that’s the moment the hostess arrives to tell Mr. Healy that his table is ready. She doesn’t have an update on Gareth and Laurel’s table, but they don’t inquire after it. Everyone says terse goodbyes and it-was-nice-to-see-yous, and Mr. Healy and Amanda leave.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” Laurel says, and drags him out of the restaurant by his jacket. He barely holds her back long enough to retrieve their coats from the coat check before she’s out the door.

* * *

Once they’re on the street, Gareth laughs. She shoots him a withering look, but he can’t stop himself; he pinches the bridge of his nose as he tries to compose himself but it’s just too _unbelievable_. After a few seconds of unsuccessfully trying to contain his laughter, she finally cracks and laughs, too.

“Oh my God,” she says as he draws a few deep breaths to settle down. “Oh my God.”

“That was awful,” he says.

“That was just the tip of the awful iceberg,” she says.

“You went to school together?” he asks.

“She’s _my age_ ,” Laurel confirms, and they both lose it again. Laurel’s laughing so hard she has to wipe tears away from her eyes, but she pulls it together. “You know what the worst part is?”

“No,” he says, sobered by her tone of voice.

“I can’t blame that on bugs,” she says (She’d been really insistent when he showed up at her apartment earlier that everything was going to go fine on this date. Because, in her words: even though the whole bug thing is a weird situation, that’s all it is. A situation. Everything else, she’d promised, was going to be totally normal). “That’s just… my life.”

She sounds totally resigned to it, which is understandable if the rest of her life has been anything like that conversation. He looks over at her. She’s staring at her feet as they walk. Her nose is a little bit red, but whether it’s from the laughing or the nippy evening wind, he can’t be sure. She glances up at him, and there’s something hopeful and inquiring in her expression.

“Well,” he says, tucking his hands into his coat pockets. “I’m assuming your father won’t always be crashing our dates.”

She laughs, but it’s humorless. “If this was a first date, I’m not sure it warrants a second one,” she says.

“How about a third first one?” he says.

“That might be too many first dates,” she says.

“Nah,” he says, and she smiles.

“Well,” she says, drawing up close to him as they walk and slipping her fingers through his. “If you’re free right now, I know a great pizza place that’s just down the street.”

A hole-in-the-wall pizzeria is big turnaround from the five-star restaurant they were just at, but it occurs to him that that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and he squeezes her hand as he responds. “Yeah,” he says. “That sounds perfect.”


End file.
